One of the odder folk beliefs of the pickup artist subculture is that women become worn down and used up and even a bit addled if they have sex with too many men. Men, by contrast, are said to be able to handle an equal number of female lovers with grace and aplomb.
In a recent post, our old friend Heartiste offers what he sees as decisive photographic evidence illustrating the different effects of promiscuity on men and women. One bit of this evidence: a picture of a young woman used to advertise some sort of singles event. Reflections from the photographer’s lights obscure her pupils, an offputting effect that gives her a slightly deranged look.
Heartiste, apparently not curious enough to wonder why the woman seems to have no pupils, sees this as clear photographic evidence of the tell-tale “thousand cock stare” that he believes women develop after exposure to more than the lifetime recommended allotment of penises.
To underscore his claim that promiscuous men are “more emotionally stable and contented” than their female counterparts, Heartiste offers this photographic evidence:
I think we can all see the problem here. Aside from the fact that a single photograph of someone smiling offers no real clue to that person’s relative stability or degree of happiness with their life – there are plenty of people who can put a good face on all sorts of troubles – this is not actually a picture of a promiscuous man.
It’s a picture of actor John Hamm playing the character of Don Draper, a promiscuous ad exec on Mad Men, in full costume and makeup and doing his best to act the part of a contented man.
As regular viewers of the show are well aware, Don Draper is not always so contented. Indeed, the character is a near-constant drinker with a troubled past who ruins two marriages through his compulsive womanizing.
Here are pictures of Don Draper in some less-happy moments.
Can we conclude therefore that excess promiscuity will turn smiling, confident men into puking emotional wrecks? Well, no, because, again, Draper is a CHARACTER, not a person. He’s NOT REAL.
But don’t try telling Heartiste that, because he seems to prefer to live in an imaginary world.
A man can sample the slits and furrows of outrageous fortune and survive the whirlwind of passion to mark a day in the future when he contentedly and without pathological second-guessing slips into a stabler, longer term commitment.
Women who have sampled a poo poo platter of penes accumulate emotional scars that never heal; promiscuous women have a mental storage closet filled with five minute montages of alpha male love, and these exciting, prurient memories rob the female id of something important. Call it purity or innocence or self-worth or ability to appreciate romantic idealism, the slut with ass chafing from riding the cock carousel is never the same as she was before she let herself get pummeled by dick.
Uh, just so you know, Heartiste, the Chinese menu item you evidently have in mind is actually called a Pu Pu Platter. A Poo Poo Platter is something, well, a bit different.
Then again, I suspect that most of those women who’ve “sampled” Heartiste’s alleged charms would have, in hindsight, rather spent the evening cleaning shit out of a toilet tank.
I had an annular hymen. It formed a thick rubbery ring around my vaginal opening as opposed to just being a nice crescent shaped membrane at the os. I had played sports, used tampons for the better part of a decade prior to having PIV sex. My partner and I had fought with my hymen for months prior. The thing was reinforced with steel, I swear. I was on top, basically rubbing the glans of his penis between my labia which was all we could do because we could not break that seal. It must have felt pretty good because he instinctively thrusted upwards and ripped me wide open. I screamed, flew off of him onto my back, reached down and blood was pouring out of me at an alarming rate. I sat on the toilet until the bleeding stopped. It was only hymen that had torn. I didn’t rip beyond that point, thank goodness. I stopped bleeding fairly quickly but while I was bleeding it was profuse. My partner was very unhelpful as he’s bad around blood.
The next dozen times we had sex were awful. I ripped further the next time. This freaked the shit out of him because he felt the tissue “snapping” as it ripped and he knew how badly it hurt and that I’d bleed. Then, the next several times he attempted penetrating me, he could feel tissue in my vagina stretching to accommodate his penis which was accompanied by more of the snapping and popping sensations as muscle fibres were ripping.
SO that whole “Your first time hurts” thing isn’t entirely a social construction. Some of us really are built that way. No amount of masturbation and tampon usage and athletics will change that. Your options are hymenectomy or what I went through. I tend to think I’ll talk to my daughters about having an exam and, if necessary, hymenectomy prior to becoming sexually active just because it was so, so horrible.
The hymen’s another case of “if a woman-thing doesn’t hurt, you’re not doing it right,” isn’t it?
There’s so little anyone could have done to make it less painful. I just wanted to tear my hymen and stretch my vagina out as fast as possible so I could start enjoying sex. If I’d had a brain and been less scared and ashamed of my own body I would have gone to the doctor and been referred to a surgeon to at least get my hymen out of the way.
In other knews also from TMI land, I had anal sex for the first time on Friday night. I was relaxed and he was being respectful and gentle but like two and a half pumps in despite being totally comfortable physically I panicked and asked him to stop. We’ll try again but for whatever reason I freaked the fuck out that time. Weird.
He made me feel really nice though. I’m fat and I have stretch marks and huge breasts lots of guys are put off by and I rarely do any hair removal. I didn’t shave my legs on purpose because I thought it would discourage us from having sex which I thought we wouldn’t be ready for. We were though and while I was holding my breath, waiting for him to discover something about my body that was a deal breaker, he went to town on me. He was actually really, really into my tits and, without prompting, told me he loved my pubic hair. You never hear that anymore. Awesome.
@marinerachel,
Yeah, I remember hearing the doctors during my abortion say I had two hymens, which probably contributed to the pain all the times my then-boyfriend and tried and tried to have PIV with no success. And both of which they had to cut to be able to perform the abortion. I am all in favour of hymenectomy!
And! And! I’m so happy to hear about your partner! Sounds like a good dude. 😀
No, the social construct is that a) all women have their vagina sealed off when they’re young, and if your first time with PIV doesn’t hurt then there must have been a special occasion before when you broke it, and b) you have to suffer through your first time. (Because I doubt that many people know that you can have a gynecologist remove it, if you were to have a thick hymen to begin with.)
I just wanted to pipe in about the hymen breaking/bleeding during first sexual experience topic, I wanted to share some information that was hugely interesting to me, so please disregard if this is not new info. I was always led to believe (very ‘traditional’ family/ extremely patriarchal religious upbringing) that the hymen was like a piece of skin stretched over a drum, just waiting to be broken (and obviously therefore ruined forever…but I digress) anyway a few months ago I found an article that explained the hymen much more accurately as more like an accordian with folds around an opening. I wish that I could remember where the article is so I could link it. Anyway, the point that I took away was that just like every other body part the hymen will very hugely from person to person, some people have a more flexible membrane that will adjust easily, while others have more rigid/less flexible tissue that will bleed and hurt more. Personally I must have been in the latter catergory, which combined with a very uncaring, insensitive first lover made my initial sexual experiences rather unpleasant. I bled the first time, as well as frequently over the the first year until after my first child was born. Anyway, if anyone has any more useful info on the topic please feel free to add :).
Kittehserf:
Brava!!!
Somebody should submit that to the “Anglish” project where people try to construct the modern English language without French/Latin/Greek influence.
Dvärghundspossen, I wonder if the horse-riding thing was some sort of euphemism for girls masturbating?
Alex: Argh, that memory. Masturbation while lying down in the snow is something I’d rather not have ever tried. Not that it went too badly, but it could have gone really badly considering (details deleted for excessive TMI). It’s really good to be an adult and have full privacy indoors.
I had the hymenectomy. It required anesthesia and a couple of stitches and I still bled like a stuck pig for a few hours. And it hurt quite badly–first from the surgical cuts (I vividly remember waking up to find out the painkilling effects of the anesthesia had mostly worn off before I’d managed to fill my percocet prescription) and then from the stitches (less sharp, but they made sitting on hard surfaces a no-go for about a week.)
The horseback riding thing, to my knowledge, was actually about having your legs spread wide, as if one’s hymen rips when they do the splits or if the tissue is pulled tight and you bounce a little it pops.
Physical activity doesn’t ware down body parts that aren’t involved. I’d love to see a single case of horseback hymen rupturing having happened. It just doesn’t make physiological sense. In general, if you’ve got a hymen, big or small, direct force is what ruptures it, not stretching and bouncing. It’s not some abnormally tight piece of tissue, waiting around to get ripped. It’s plenty flexible to accommodate all movement.
I’ve still got all my hymen tissue, the proverbial “hymen tags” as it were, about my vaginal os. Would like them removed. I doubt it’s worth it though. I’d probably need it done under local and I don’t want to feel the injections or any of the recovery. Sex the first time afterwards would just be awful. Same reasons I won’t go for labiaplasty. I don’t care enough to go through with the procedure and recovery.
Adding my part to the TMI train, my first time hurt a bit (no blood). I don’t know if it has anything to do with my hymen or what. My first time after recovering from having my son hurt a bit too. While I was nervous/a little scared my first time, I wasn’t after having the kid. At any rate, not counting those times, it’s always been enjoyable. As to pap smears, those always hurt horrifically until I got a new doctor a few years ago. I used to practically get physically ill with anxiety every time I was due for one.
Has anyone heard stories about the mother of the bride saving chicken blood for her daughter to spread on the sheets on her wedding night to ‘prove’ she was a virgin, in case she didn’t bleed? I always wondered if that ever happened.
I’ve heard those stories before. Maybe it’s because mothers knew that virgins didn’t always bleed. It can’t have escaped women’s notice for thousands of years.
That reminds me of a bit in a Nora Lofts novel about Katherine of Aragon. She’s with Prince Arthur on their wedding night, and he’s really not keen on having sex that night – fifteen and nervous, no wonder! – and Katherine says, “Well, who’s going to know?” He answers, miserably, that he’s been told there should be some blood. Katherine’s astonished, and asks whose. “Yours,” he says, so she gets a knife out of the fruit bowl and sticks it in her heel, where nobody’s going to see a little cut.
Servants’ reaction next morning: “What a lot! But they’re different from us, these Spaniards.”
The horseback riding thing, like the “bears can smell you menstruating” thing, smacks of “all this outdoor activity isn’t very ladylike.”
The blockquote monster demands a sacrifice:
I want to throw out there that hymen-breaking is Serious Business in some parts of the world. The idea that it can be broken doing some non-sexual thing is widespread, and has ramifications. Here’s a quote from an ethnographer who did some research in Iraqi Kurdistan:
She thinks about it every day because not bleeding on the wedding night = her brother is going to literally murder her.
Just ran into that re-reading a 2008 article about namus. This is only one reason why I cannot take seriously any dude’s assertion that men are, and historically have been, this super-oppressed gender. No. Oppression is worrying daily about being murdered for something that is inherent to your phenotypical gender, and is totally outside your control.
….this was your best rebut?
Seriously?
Zero regard to the actual scient and facts he provides in his post?
Just personal attacks and ridicule?
I searched the web for people who can prove what he says is wrong. This is the #1 hit on google.
Pathetic.